I played around with JBoss und JSR88 and built a modified generic JBoss plugin
for WTP 3.0 which performs deployment through JSR88 instead of file copying
(works for JBoss 4.2 and 5.0). Hopefully someone finds it useful.

Benefits are:
a) the default timeout of 10 seconds is no longer required, because the deployer
code returns after successful deployment/undeployment. So a "run on server" of
e.g. a JSP page will be executed after the app is deployed, even if deployment
lasts some minutes.
b) remote deployment should be possible (I did not test it up to now, but bv
specifying a remote server adresse in the server properties, this should be
possible). You will still need a local server installation for WTP to resolve
the JAR dependencies, but deployment should be possible to a remote port.

Problems are:
a) Apps which are deployed through JSR88 are not "persistent", which means that
they are lost after server restart and must be redeployed. This means that the
eclipse deployment state ("app is published") is wrong after a restart.
b) WTP setting "publish on server startup" is not possible, because the deployer
cannot connect while server startup. So switch off this option.

Are there plans to integrate JSR88 deployment in WTP? Seems that though this is
a standard, big parts of its implementation are still server dependent :-(.